Fueling High Performance Computing (HPC) on Clouds with GPUs

Businesses are increasingly investing in HPC to manufacture higher quality products faster, optimize oil and gas exploration, improve patient outcomes, detect fraud and breaches, mitigate financial risks, and more. HPC also helps governments respond faster to emergencies, analyze terrorist threats better and accurately predict the weather – all vital for national security, public safety, and the environment. The economic and social value of HPC is immense.

HPC workloads are also getting larger and spikier with more interdisciplinary analyses, higher fidelity models, and larger data volumes. Hence, managing and deploying on-premises HPC is getting harder and more expensive, especially as the line between HPC and analytics is blurring in every industry. Businesses are also challenged with rapid technology refresh cycles, limited in-house datacenter space, skills to cost-effectively operate an on-premises HPC environment customized to match performance, security and compliance requirements. So, businesses are increasingly considering cloud computing. Hence, HPC on the cloud is growing at over 4 times the growth rate of HPC.

As a pioneer in cloud computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to innovate and overcome many past issues with using public clouds for HPC. AWS is fueling the rapid migration of HPC to the cloud with some key differentiators such as the NVIDIA GPU-enabled cloud instances for compute and remote visualization and a growing ecosystem of highly-skilled partners.

Likewise, NVIDIA, as the leader in accelerated computing for HPC and Artificial Intelligence/Deep Learning (AI/DL), continues to invest in building a robust ecosystem of software for highly parallel computing. A recent analyst report shows that 70% of the most popular HPC applications, including 15 of the top 15 are accelerated by GPUs. These provide upwards of two orders of magnitude of speed up compared to CPUs. AWS and NVIDIA GPU Cloud ( NGC) container registry available on AWS marketplace provide NVIDIA GPU-optimized containers to simplify deployment of key HPC applications. AWS and NVIDIA is a winning combination for HPC.